In Melbourne on Saturday, more than 2000 women and men gathered for a protest called slutwalk. The immediate catalyst for the march was the indiscretion of a Toronto police officer who was giving a routine safety talk to ten students, but the walk is in broad reaction to a long history of sexual discrimination against women. See here for a comprehensive report on the Melbourne slutwalk and here for an excellent column by Catherine Deveny (plus hundreds of disparate comments that I can’t be bothered with).

Anyway, the officer at the heart of this told the students:

Women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimised.

The effect around the globe has been massive, and slutwalks have sprung up everywhere in Canada and the US, Europe and Australia, ostensibly to reclaim the word slut and remove its perlocutionary force as an offensive word, but also to show support for gender equality and denounce rape and other forms of sexual abuse and harassment.

This interests me linguistically as instances of word reclamation are infrequent, and usually happen at a grassroots level by spreading throughout a community as opposed to by prescription, so it will be interesting to see how the reclamation of slut works out.

Linguist Arnold Zwicky has already commented on the existence of the other non-slur use of slut, as a suffix meaning ‘someone enthusiastic about’, such as scrabble-slut. Slut has therefore already joined a long list of slurs that have non-slur uses as suffixes, including -nazi, -virgin, -whore and -queen. He concludes:

I don’t think “a slut is a slut”. It depends on the morphology and the context, and words can be reclaimed.

But can slut be reclaimed?

There have been only a few successful word reclamations in English globally over the last hundred years or so; the most notable of these is nigger, but other examples are fag (but interestingly, not faggot), queen and although it hasn’t completed the journey yet, cunt. So looking at these examples, can we infer anything about how successful an attempt at word reclamation is going to be?

I mentioned above that word reclamation is usually driven at a grassroots level, whereby the community to whom an offensive term is directed begin using it as an in-group marker of identity. At the same time its use by someone outside the group is still taken to be offensive, but is now rendered powerless as compared with the power that its in-group use has in strengthening group identity. For instance, the power of nigger used as a slur is minuscule compared with its power to strengthen pride in the black community. Being told that a word is no longer offensive just might not work; it has to spread from below. Much like democracy in the Middle-East.

There’s also another element to word reclamation that might not work in slut‘s favour. Successful reclamations like nigger, fag and cunt describe things that are just facts about people and are thus not subject to value-judgment; being black, being gay, or being female. The dictionary of the computer I’m writing this on defines slut as “a slovenly or promiscuous woman”. So slut describes behaviour which is potentially subject to value-judgment, and there’ll always be someone in the world who will judge it harshly.

Melbourne, as many people will be aware, has been in the process of unveiling a new, fancy integrated ticketing system to replace the old magnetic tickets. Just like Sydney’s Tcard, the MyKi has suffered cost blowouts and delays, and since its release has been marred by lack of broad take-up in the community, and problems to do with functionality and billing, for those that have. Sydney’s Tcard on the other hand never made it to full roll-out and was scrapped instead.

Some have pointed to the inherent problems of the system as the cause of the failings; the reinventing of the wheel when it comes to devising the technology, the lack of need for the system given that the Metcard is already an integrated ticketing system, the lack of financial incentive for the user to adopt the system (indeed, the user is discouraged from adopting the system because the card itself requires a deposit), or the lack of support for tourists and infrequent transport users.

But I propose that there’s a deeper seeded reason for the failings of the MyKi, which will also explain the failings of the Tcard.

Some of the Snapper card formats on offer

If we turn our attention to some of the more successful systems, then we see that the Oyster card (London) works well, has a financial incentive in that it’s cheaper, and more complicated fare structures are done away with, and allows the user to have a single card that works for all modes of transport. Wellington’s Snapper (pictured above) similarly works well and successfully integrated the various forms of transport in New Zealand’s capital and has enjoyed a high rate of uptake.

And finally Hong Kong’s Octopus card, which was the first integrated chip-based ticketing system in the world, and arguably the most successful. With the Octopus, the user can choose from different formats – why does it need to be a standard sized card? You can get small keyring based Octopuses with mobile phone straps, and younger users might be more at home with little Rilakkuma designs (pictured below).

I think it’s quite obvious what’s wrong with MyKi and the Tcard: they haven’t used marine animals in their names. In the interest of helping out the common good, I’m hereby making some suggestions to the Victorian and New South Wales Governments:

Mullet Card

Grunter Card

Red Herring

Blobfish

White Whale

If any government representatives would like to buy any of these names from me, feel free to leave a comment below and make an offer.

<update date=”April 21, 2011″>
It was suggested to me last night that a nice marine themed name that also captures the incompetence of the roll-out is fail whale.
</update>

A friend pointed me in the direction of this job advertisement the other day. It appears to be for a cleaner in a gym. Apart from the obvious euphemy in the job description, I was intrigued by the subversion of the job ad genre1.

Here is the ad in full:

Changeroom & Poolside Assistant

Bit of a neat freak?

Sydney CBD

Part time opportunity

We’re looking for fun, fit and feisty people with that certain ‘Virgin-ness’. WAHEY. We smile a lot and we always put our people first. So come and work with us at Virgin Active – it’s going to be fun. You like?

Our shiny club is probably the best thing you’ve ever seen. Like, ever. And we want it to stay like this, so we need a Changeroom & Poolside Assistant to keep it looking and feeling delicious for all the amazing people who work and work-out here. If you’re a serious ‘neat freak’, you’ll love taking responsibility for ensuring the changerooms and pool areas are sparkly clean and looking spectacular. ‘Cause, duh, we’re Virgin’. You’ll wipe down treadmills to ensure members don’t slip on their own sweat and pick up any towels lying around (we like to keep them white and fluffy). And you’ll be uber responsible because you’ll supervise aquatics and ensure safety is properly maintained.

Some stuff that will help you get the job:

At least six-months experience

Super-friendly, communicatey type of person

A bit of a neat-freak (and love to keep things clean and tidy)

Pool Lifeguard certificate would be awesome but not essential

Current Senior First Aid certificate and CPR/AED certification would be cool

There’s lots in here to look at in the context of a job advertisement genre. The non-standard lexical items (communicatey, uber), heavy use of slang and youth-oriented language (duh, ‘like, ever’), attempts at humour (love bananas?) and playing up the whole virgin thing, especially the expletive wahey.

Above all, this job ad smacks of a corporate project to reinvigorate and funkify the company, one platform of which is to attract employees who they think would have a new, youthful, ‘cool’ approach to their jobs. They cleverly realise that the first interaction many people have with their jobs is the ad. And if they were trying to foster a youthful working environment, a traditional job ad — the sort that has phrases like required skills and desirable qualities as opposed to Current Senior First Aid certificate and CPR/AED certification would be cool— might deter the sort of applicants that they want.

However it still reads like an odd mixture of sexed-up, inauthentic youth-speak, and traditional corporate speak. For instance, the juxtaposition of the colloquial Super-friendly, communicatey type of person with the rather mundane, human resources jargon of Can do a rotating roster with weekends between 5:30am and 10:30pm is a bit jarring.

I suggest that Virgin underestimate their audience. Everybody who lives in a speech community is (at least subconsciously) aware of the various genres of language that surround them — from the extremely colloquial such as a chat between friends in a social situation, to the extremely formal, like legal proceedings, as well as the massive continuum between these poles2. I don’t see how anyone could have difficulty understanding a job ad that was more typical of the genre.

But then again, I suppose Virgin’s motivation is not to be understood by more people, but rather to stand out among the plethora of uninteresting job advertisements on the market.

Sorry about the choice of title, but I couldn’t resist the increase in traffic from Google with the two keywords. [↩]

I’m aware that these are better described as registers, whereas I refer above to the job ad ‘genre’, but the two concepts are inextricably linked. [↩]

I read today that Macquarie Dictionary have named their Word of the Year for 2010: Googleganger.

The word is immediately understandable; a googleganger is someone that has the same name as you, whom you find when egosearching on Google. Quite obviously it is a blend of Google and doppelganger.

However I have a few apprehensions about calling it the word of the year.

It’s been around a lot longer than a year, as this timeline will attest1. The earliest instance appears to be from August 2004, in an article written by Geoff Boucher for the Lifestyle section of the South Florida Sun.

It’s use since Geoff Boucher first used it appears to have waned by the end of 2008 and has only been used a couple of times per year or so since then.

It was never in natural use anyway. If you look closely at all the instances of the word, they’re all much like the following in that the writers felt they had to define the word when using it.

But for some people there’s a problem When they Google their names someone else comes up That person is a Googleganger It’s someone with your very name but often a totally different life.

That to me indicates that people were trying hard for the word to become accepted, but still it could never quite find its own legs.

I’d never heard of it before today, and neither had anyone else I asked.

Ignore the single instance from 2000; that’s due to Google’s method of attributing dates to web pages. This particular page, from Stephen Fry’s QI, is actually from December 2009. It’s only listed as 2000 because Google have apparently opted to pay attention to a date mentioned on the page rather than the page header itself. [↩]

This is evidently my first post in some six months and I have to confess, I have been thinking about throwing in the towel altogether. Two of the reasons for this were that I have been writing (although again, not lately) on Fully (sic), Crikey’s language blog, and that I was so busy teaching over the past few semesters in Sydney that I couldn’t put in the time or effort that this blog deserved.

But, a lot has changed in the past couple of months and I’ve been encouraged to get back into the whole writing thing. First and foremost, I am now enrolled as a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne, and the relatively light workload (compared with teaching undergraduate linguistics classes) allows me much more time to write. Also as a direct result of moving to Melbourne from Sydney to commence said PhD, my social life is far less active.

I wrote of my intentions to do a PhD well over a year ago but I only managed to commence last month. The reason being that I was unsuccessful in scoring a scholarship at the time, and so had to reconsider my plans – as I was unprepared to start a PhD without the security of a stipend. After some months of weighing up several possibilities, including enrolling part-time and working as much as I could, I was approached and asked to join the ARC research project on Aboriginal Child Language Acquisition and have the Tiwi Islands as my field site. After attending a couple of meetings with the other ACLA researchers, I decided it would be a good idea.

Thus far I have already been to the Tiwi Islands for a pilot trip; to garner support for the project from the community and various levels of government and administration and to gauge the linguistic situation as best I could in the two weeks1. I discovered that the award-winning Murrupurtiyanuwu Catholic School, which is a co-educational primary school that has been running a successful bilingual education program since 1974, has this year ceased the program. The decision is apparently not related to the NT’s first four hours in English policy, but I have yet to investigate2. But it is a fact that the independent school was not required by the government to cease its bilingual program.

Another thing that warrants a mention is the release of a volume on language maintenance and revitalisation that includes a chapter by me about the theory and practicalities of electronic dictionaries. The book is Re-Awakening Languages edited by John Hobson et al.3and my chapter is Electronic dictionaries for language reclamation.

All this without actually doing any ‘research’ as such, as I didn’t yet have permission from the Tiwi Land Council to do so. [↩]

I’m also careful not to go poking around before I have permission from all stake-holders to do my research [↩]

This week, an argument has been being waged in the Opinion section of the Sydney Morning Herald about the effect of the internet on language. It started with an article on Tuesday about Australian author Cate Kennedy, who fears literature is being threatened by the internet. She’s referring specifically to writers who become addicted to being online and therefore cannot put as much effort into their art.

English mangled

I agree with Cate Kennedy’s criticism of the effect of the internet on literature, but it spreads further than that, with technology affecting the entire English language (“A click too far: the internet’s toxic effect on literature”, April 13). The internet and its ease of communication has shaped English into a pseudo-speech characterised by grammatical errors and inaccuracies in syntax, punctuation and commonsense. Where is the line drawn between beneficial advancement and irreversible side effects? Will our desire for progress come at the sake of our language?

Anna Pavlakis Greenwich

I read this and thought ‘enough is enough’, and replied with this letter which appeared the following day:

Every so often a letter appears decrying the demise of English due either to some generation younger than that of the letter writer, or to technology such as mobile phones and the internet.

When these letters appear, I read them aloud to my colleagues, always to their amusement. But on reading Anna Pavlakis’s letter (April 14), I decided it was about time we put an end to this nonsense.

English is not becoming a “pseudo-speech”. Technology is not causing its demise. Young people who cannot accurately place an apostrophe, or who think “should’ve” is a contraction of “should of”, will not bring about the inevitable destruction of Anglophone civilisation.

The easy way to respond to these ludicrous claims is to cite the continual evolution of living languages. Such change is neither good nor bad; it just is.

Second, most people have always had difficulty with English – ask any high school English teacher. Such difficulties were not created by technology, they are merely more visible.

For most English speakers this doesn’t matter. Advanced skills in such a horrible language as English are necessary only for a small percentage of people, and only then because we arbitrarily attach prestige to a standard form of the English language that retains a plethora of irregularities and archaic forms and is therefore very difficult to master.

With this in mind, the internet is actually the great democratiser, allowing many more people than ever before to gain access to privilege by removing the arbitrary barrier of English linguistic mastery.

Aidan Wilson Department of Linguistics, University of Sydney

And this morning, I opened up to the letters page to find no less than three responses to my letter.

I can just see my year 9 English class when I tell them Aidan Wilson thinks most of us don’t need advanced English skills (Letters, April 15). Even better when I mention hopefully that the internet makes for a more democratic society. “Fantastic,” they will say and toss away their quaintly “archaic” novels that I make them read, to feast instead on the dross online.

Yes, language is not static and can accommodate the influence of technology, but “lol” and (: will not cut it when my students need solutions to problems requiring complex and precise language skills. By having no standards we are reduced to the lowest common denominator. How depressing. What’s wrong with trying to master complex things? Are we becoming dumber? Maybe it is the end of civilisation as we know it.

Cathy Hooke Ashfield

As a former English teacher I take umbrage at Aidan Wilson’s diatribe. Has Mr Wilson ever read Chaucer or Shakespeare? The wealth of vocabulary, beauty and “infinite variety” of the English language are evident in the magnificence of our literary tradition, which is sadly being lost because of the widespread use and abuse of modern technologies.

For shame! Mr Wilson is promulgating superficial and base ideas about the English language.

Michele Linkiewicz Caringbah

One must admire the confidence of the linguisticians3 of Sydney University that they can “put an end to this nonsense” (moral panic about civilisation being destroyed by slovenly English expression) by anything so simple as a letter to the Herald. Nevertheless their reassurance is convincing. I don’t suppose they would accept my observations as scientific evidence, but, over 40 years as a seconary [sic] school teacher, I have noticed that pupils’ written work was always superior to their parents’ writing, as evidenced by the standard of absence notes. Indeed, excellent English in an absence note was a pretty good indication of a forgery.

Raymond McDonald Stanmore

Perhaps Raymond McDonald is right; I am probably jousting with windmills by writing a letter, but you can’t blame me for having a go!

The titles of the letters, by the way, are the creation of the letters page editors, and not the letter writers. [↩]

On Sunday I went to the triannual1 Sydney Camera Market, which was basically a room full of old cameras, lenses, filters, as well as some new stuff. As an amateur photographer trying my hand at film photography, I found it very interesting. I’d never seen a Hasselblad in the flesh, and there was a huge range of great film SLR cameras, TLRs, folding cameras and hundreds of lenses.

I managed to pick up for myself a new toy; an Agfa Isolette I folding camera, made in Germany between 1951 and 1954. So this even predates my Yashica-Mat twin-lens reflex camera from 1958 (of which I don’t seem to have a photo, off-hand [update: I now have a picture, below]).

Click images for larger versions.

My new Agfa Isolette I folding camera.

Coincidentally, when I bought the camera, I was wearing a t-shirt bought from an online store that had a sketch of a very similar camera on it. So similar in fact, the seller remarked on it and claimed that it too was an Agfa folding camera. It was only later that afternoon that I realised the camera on my shirt is indeed the very same model as I had just bought.

A T-shirt I bought 4 months ago.

There was also a wonderful restored Rolleiflex from 1935, just like the one in the image below, for $250.

1935 Rolleiflex

I had a look through the viewing lens and wanted to buy it immediately. But since I already have a 1958 Yashica-Mat, I can’t exactly justify buying another TLR before I’ve learned how to properly use it. I’ve only taken a single roll of film with the Yashica-Mat thus far, and as I didn’t have a light metre at the time it was more or less guesswork to get the right shot. You can see the images from the first roll here.

I just arrived home after having my very first bicycle-vehicle collision, so I feel like I’ve had my initiation into cycling in Sydney (after cycling in and around Sydney for more than 18 months).

I’m not injured – just a bruise on my thigh, a scratched arm, a sore hip and a tender shoulder (where I put a dent in her rear passenger door) – just a little shaken up. Lucky I was wearing a helmet; my head came down on the road pretty heavily after I rolled off the back of her car. The bike suffered just a little bit of wheel bend (a little truing will sort that out) but the brakes and gears were pretty easily contorted back into their rightful positions.

My only concern now is that her insurance company may claim that I was in the wrong, where in fact all present agreed that it was just an unfortunate incident for which no one is responsible.

As I was leaving the house the other morning, I took a quick look in the letterbox and found a small, fridge magnet-sized flyer:

I have to confess, I have no idea what the message in this is supposed to be. Why use the election cycle as the frame of reference? Is this an election ad? If so, where is the ‘Authorised by…’ fine print? Is whomever this flyer advertises planning to stop immigration? And why pick on the Greens?

I consider myself to be a fairly intelligent person, but for the life of me, I just don’t understand!